Online holiday shopping sales up 15.2%: Chase Holiday Pulse

By Jason Owen

NEW YORK — Consumers continued to shop online in ever-increasing numbers this holiday season, according to Chase Holiday Pulse, an aggregator of payment processing data from 50 of Chase Paymentech's largest U.S. e-commerce merchants. Pulse results showed YTD year-over-year sales growth of 15.2%.

For the overall holiday season, Oct. 29 through Dec. 25, the Pulse analysis also revealed transaction growth was up 24.3% YoY, while the average ticket price number continued to decline by 7.3% YoY.

Along with these results, the Chase Holiday Pulse data revealed several more trends from the holiday shopping season.

For the period from Black Friday (i.e., Nov. 23) through Nov. 30, YoY sales increased by 22.5%, and transactions increased by 32.7%. The busiest shopping week was Dec. 10 (i.e., Green Monday) through Dec. 16. Mobile device use continued to climb as well. Trends continue to show consumers using mobile devices to research products they viewed in stores and then purchase the items online later. Part of the boost for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is also attributed to the increase of holiday promotions from retailers, with heavy activity of emails, online coupons and discounts.

Overall, the data and trends point toward a very strong and successful year for online merchants in 2012.